“I wish we’d spotted this email sooner. If we’d responded to the customer on time and more appropriately, the issue wouldn’t have been escalated and we wouldn’t have this problem!”
This is a common scenario which, in this day and age, should no longer be an issue for businesses.
Put yourself in the shoes of your team. Tasked with staying on top of all your customer correspondence, and in the midst of trying to clear out the inbox, the most tempting approach is to quickly respond to a few easy emails. Taking the simplest messages requiring a minimal or rote response and firing off a few quick replies is just human nature.
Where teams are using a shared inbox, this problem is amplified. Employees taking the time to cherry pick which email to work on next can delay a response. Plus, difficult or complex cases are often de-prioritised, therefore potentially missing SLAs and ultimately delaying the response to the customer.
Technology has moved on, and trying to manually prioritise your department emails is not time well spent. Not only is it time-consuming, but it’s also prone to manual errors.
So how to best avoid these issues? How to make sure difficult or time-sensitive emails aren’t ignored or unnoticed by your team?
The first task is to identify issues requiring additional focus and attention using a real-time view of operational performance. Having an awareness of any unresolved emails within your SLA threshold will make delegation easier and more efficient.
The second task is to take the onus of working out which emails are most urgent/important out of the hands of your team. If employees are automatically given the next most important email to respond to, not only will the time taken to move from one email to another be reduced, but they won’t be able to ignore difficult or time-consuming cases.
Take a look at our case study to find out how we created a bespoke email management solution for one of our clients, leading to a 175% increase in advisor productivity.